Have you ever wanted to show a list of the entire download history of your Mac?
Whether it’s for troubleshooting, personal interest, or forensics, MacOSXDaily has a nifty Terminal tip that will show you a list of all the files you’ve downloaded.
It’s an old tip, dating back to 2012, but it still works perfectly.
OSXDaily has put together 10 commands you can use in the Terminal app to customize how Mac OS X looks and works. These commands are called Defaults Write commands because they alter the default settings of OS X. They are of course reversible, and the list shows the commands you need to type in the Terminal, as well as how to return it to Apple’s default settings.
Some of the commands include: Always Show Hidden Files in the Finder, Speed Up Mission Control Animations, Change Where Screen Shots Are Saved To, and Show System Info at the Login Screen.
For users with the latest & greatest Macs, the animations Lion added are probably barely noticeable. But for those of us running it on older Macs, it’s painfully slow and quite annoying. Thankfully, much like removing the new Mail animation I wrote about last week, you can remove the animation completely.
Launch the Terminal app and type the following and hit Return after:
defaults write com.apple.dock expose-animation-duration -float 0
Before the change takes affect, you need to restart OS X’s Dock, which you do by typing the following in the Terminal and hitting Return:
killall Dock
Thanks to OSXDaily for the tip, and a few more adjustments you can make to Mission Control’s animation, including restoring it to its original state.
Lion has brought lots of small tweaks and changes to the Mac OS, and some people don’t like those changes. Here are a few ways you can change things using the Terminal in Mac OSX Lion to customize the OS to your liking.Key Repeat
When holding a key down on your keyboard, Lion now offers a pop-up displaying the accent characters available by default, instead of simply repeating the character.
Back in the days prior to OS X, it was easy to find 3rd party (and Apple) system extensions on your Mac. They were all located in the System>Extensions folder. With OS X though, the task of even knowing which kernel extensions are installed isn’t quite as easy, which can be particularly frustrating when you’re troubleshooting an issue on your Mac.For the geeks among you, it’s quite easy though. To list all 3rd party extensions, simply launch the Terminal app located in your Utilities folder and type the following:
kextstat | grep -v com.apple
You can also list all the Apple-installed kernel extensions by typing:
kextstat
I came across this little hint over at OSXDaily, a site I visit quite often because of the variety of topics covered.
There are already many applications available which allow you to tweek the settings in OSX Leopard to adjust the dock, the menu bar, and other areas you wish to alter. But one thing that bothers me is having all those little apps hanging around my hard drive, or worse yet, running at all times. UsingMac has listed 13 very handy Terminal commands that do the same thing as many of these apps, without the space and memory overhead. It’s as simple as copy & paste. Check them out.